The Media Floodgates Finally Open on Biden Sexual Assault Allegation

A 27-year-old allegation circulating among Bernie Sanders supporters and propped up by Trumpworld, which Biden denies, was featured in the Times,Post, AP, and NBC over the weekend. For Never Biden adherents, it may not be enough.

For nearly three weeks, prominent Bernie Sanders supporters have wondered aloud when major news organizations would cover a sexual assault allegation against Joe Biden from a former Senate staff assistant. Tara Reade’s claim, that Biden assaulted her while the two were in the basement of a Capitol Hill office complex in 1993, rocketed around the Berniesphere late last month following an interview with Katie Halper, a journalist supportive of Sanders, and after an appearance on Democracy Now! The mainstream-media floodgates opened this weekend after the New York Times,, the Washington Post,NBC News, and the Associated Press all reported on Reade’s claim.

The flood of coverage, and certain aspects of it, did not go unremarked upon by former Sanders campaign staffers and pro-Sanders media figures. “Every one of these outlets instantly reported on [Brett] Kavanaugh’s accusation when it was an anonymous letter they hadn’t even seen,” tweetedBranko Marcetic, a Jacobin writer and author of an anti-Biden book. “I agree outlets should be thorough, get the reporting right, have respect for due process of the accused. But where was this concern with Kavanaugh and Trump? Were those allegations mishandled because the existence of an accusation was reported on the day it came to light?”

Reade, who last year accused Biden of inappropriate touching around the same time that seven other women leveled allegations of their own, made the sexual assault claim last month on Halper’s podcast. There, and in later interviews, she said Biden thrust her against a wall and proceeded to grope and penetrate her with his fingers while the two were alone. “He was whispering to me and trying to kiss me at the same time, and he was saying, ‘Do you want to go somewhere else?’’’ she told the AP, noting the incident took place after she brought him a gym bag. “I remember wanting to say stop, but I don’t know if I said it out loud or if I just thought it. I was kind of frozen up,” she added. Reade, who was then in her 20s, went on to claim that a “shocked and surprised” Biden responded by telling her, “Come on, man, I heard you liked me.”

Reade made her accusation official last week by by filing a public incident report with the Washington, D.C., police on Thursday. It did not cite Biden by name but detailed a contemporaneous incident. After Rich McHughreported on the report for Business Insider on Friday, the Times, the Post, the AP, and NBC News all followed, each noting in weekend stories that reporters had conducted interviews with Reade and had been looking into the allegation for several weeks.

The Post’s story, which featured four bylines, including two from its 2018 Pulitzer-winning Roy Moore investigation, even noted it had interviewed Reade last year. Back then, according to the Post, “Reade said that Biden had touched her neck and shoulders but did not mention the alleged assault or suggest there was more to the story.”

The former vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee has not personally commented on the allegations, but Kate Bedingfield, his deputy campaign manager and communications director, wholly denied them. “What is clear about this claim: It is untrue. This absolutely did not happen,” stated Bedingfield, a remark she prefaced by saying that Biden “firmly believes that women have a right to be heard—and heard respectfully. Such claims should also be diligently reviewed by an independent press.”

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Not unlike the Times’ extensive 2018reporting on Kavanaugh’s sexual-misconduct allegations, the paper’s report on Reade’s claims offers new evidence for both believers and skeptics. In 2019, while claiming Biden had “put his hand on my shoulder and run his finger up my neck,” Reade said some of her office duties were cut after she declined to work as a cocktail server at one of his events, noting her suspicion that she was given the assignment because Biden liked leering at her legs. This alleged retaliation also included taking her off intern-supervision duties and relegating her to a windowless office. Two people who served as Biden interns during Reade’s tenure confirmed to the Times that she suddenly stopped overseeing their tasks in April of that year, four months before her official exit. The former congressional interns also told the Times they did not hear about any misconduct alleged by Reade and never witnessed the two interacting.

The Times report was soundly criticized after the paper opted to stealth-edit—i.e., make a change to an article that’s not disclosed in an update or correction—a line about the other women who have accused Biden of unwanted or inappropriate touching. “No other allegation about sexual assault surfaced in the course of reporting, nor did any former Biden staff members corroborate any details of Ms. Reade’s allegation. The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses, and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable,” wrote reporters Lisa Lerer and Sydney Ember in the original, archived version of the article. After a quiet revision, that same section now reads, “No other allegation about sexual assault surfaced in the course of reporting, nor did any former Biden staff members corroborate any details of Ms. Reade’s allegation. The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden.”

Glenn Greenwald, a cofounder and editor of the left-leaning Intercept, called the paper out following the article’s editorial changes. “Wow—first the @nytimes deleted this ‘beyond’ language from their story about sexual assault accusations against Joe Biden...Now they deleted their own tweet that had that language in it,” he tweeted. “Amazing retroactive whitewashing after they published their own story.” Intercept cofounder Jeremy Scahillshared a similar sentiment, but took it a step further by suggesting that were the “unacknowledged edit” to be disclosed, it would read, “’An earlier version of this story contained a true statement that the Biden campaign demanded we remove so we cut it without alerting our readers.’” In addition, the line’s framing in and of itself has been called into question. “The word ‘beyond’ deserves overtime pay,” wroteBriahna Joy Gray, the former national press secretary for the Sanders campaign, who also called Reade’s allegation “credible.”

On Monday, Times executive editor Dean Baquettold media columnist Ben Smith—acting as the paper’s de facto public editor—that the Biden “campaign thought that the phrasing was awkward and made it look like there were other instances in which he had been accused of sexual misconduct,” which was “not what the sentence was intended to say.” Baquet said the Times didn’t consider it to be a factual mistake but “an awkward phrasing issue.” In the interview, Baquet suggested it was better for the Times to report on the allegation in great detail, even if weeks later, than to publish a breaking-news story immediately after it was leveled.

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The Times reported conflicting third-party accounts connected to Reade’s claim: One of her friends recalled a conversation about the alleged assault shortly after it happened, and another friend said that in 2008, Reade discussed a traumatic incident she experienced while working in Biden’s office. Reade claims to have told her late mother about the incident, as well as her brother, who has also publicly vouched for her. On the other side, Melissa Lefko, a former Biden staff assistant from 1992–1993, told the Times that she did not remember working with Reade but described the office as a “very supportive environment for women” and said she never experienced any harassment. In response to Reade purporting to have penned a complaint to a Senate personnel office, after her allegation was brushed aside by Biden’s staff, Marianne Baker, Biden’s executive assistant for nearly two decades, insisted she “never once witnessed, or heard of, or received, any reports of inappropriate conduct, period—not from Ms. Reade, not from anyone.”

Reade’s own political views have become part of the story too. She voted for the Obama–Biden ticket twice, but has been a Sanders supporter in the 2020 race. She told the Post that political considerations didn’t influence her decision to make the accusation against Biden. While Reade’s allegation circulated in the pro-Bernie media ecosystem, the president’s sonDonald Trump Jr. and his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, have also tried to drive media attention to it. The Post’s report on Reade noted how numerous women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct, from unwanted touching to rape. MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt also referred to Trump’s many alleged misdeeds in her coverage on the Biden allegations, concluding a Sunday segment on updates to Reade’s story by saying, “I think it’s also important that we underscore that the current sitting president has also faced multiple accusations that he denies.” Halper charged the MSNBC anchor of “going full ‘what about Trump?’”

Even after a weekend avalanche of attention from major outlets, Reade’s accusation still might not break through in this coronavirus-dominated news cycle (and today Sanders endorsed Biden, further complicating the picture). According to data collected by the cable-news-tracking service TVEyes, aside from Hunt’s Kasie DC, Reade’s allegation has received no other mentions on MSNBC and CNN since the Sunday Times and Post reports.

The Biden campaign surprisingly hasn’t reached out to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who tells the Times that the presumptive Democratic nominee should make commitments to progressives in trying to sway Bernie Sanders supporters.